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Drive a car.Play Chess.Build a website.
These are all things I haven't done in a long time. Yet, if I were to do them today, I would be reasonably good at it. Enough to hold my own.

Speak Spanish.Construct a balance sheet.Detail the historical achievements of Aurangzeb.
These are all things I haven't done in a long time either. But, if I attempt to do them today, I would be quite poor at it. Nowhere near good enough to hold my own.

The difference between the first category and the second is the way I learnt them.

For the items in the first category, I had immediate real-world consequences for doing something wrong. When I didn't release the clutch properly, the car jumps and halts, forcing me to do it again. When I make a wrong move in Chess, I lose an important pawn and I lose the game. When I make a mistake while creating a website, it won't work as I expect it to, forcing me to rectify the mistake.

For the items in the second category, I didn't have immediate real-world consequences for doing it wrong. I learnt to speak Spanish on Duolingo, which is good to get started with basic vocabulary and grammar, but not to be a fluent speaker. Any mistake I made meant I could always revisit the lesson and try again. I could still get along with my life as though I had done it right the first time. There was no immediate real-world consequence. I learnt to construct a balance sheet from a text book, again with no real world consequences for getting it wrong, except for a few marks lower, which was inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. The same with detailing the historical achievements of Aurangzeb.

Thus, in the first category, I really learned. Because of the human brain's inherent ability to prioritize avoiding real world pain. In the second, I learned and soon forgot once there was no need for retaining it. The brain isn't wired to retain things which don't help us avoid real world pain for long.

Thus, the best way to learn is by doing. And adding real world consequences to doing it wrongly.

If you are learning something, figure out how to introduce real world consequences.

This is a saying attributed to Henry Ford, who built the first mass-market motor car.

This is used by many people in tech today to stake the claim that they know what the users want better than the users themselves. While such thinking worked in the favour of Steve Jobs and Henry Ford, they were outliers. The statistically successful thing to do is to actually listen to what the users say.

That doesn't mean that we need to build them a faster horse instead of a motor car. Of course, people won't ask for a motor car which they have never seen in action before. They will ask for a faster horse because slow horses are what they use everyday and know well.

When listening to users, we need to understand what their pain is rather than simply build them what they ask for. When someone tells us what they need is a faster horse, what we need to be hearing is that they find their current mode of transport slow and can use something to speed it up. The solution that they think up for it can be a faster horse. But, the solution you think up for it can be a motor car.

At the end of the day, if it solves their problem and speeds up their commute while costing them less than the gains they realize by reducing their commute times, they will buy your solution.

Users may not know what they want until they see it. But they do know what problem they have. And a good Product Manager is adept at unearthing it.

Publish a novel.Increase my weight by 7 kilos.Publish 150 short and 50 long blog posts.Pay off my home loan.
Outcome-oriented goals are helpful to clearly visualize the end state. It helps clarify what success looks like. And it makes it very easy to say whether we achieved the goal or not. Moreover, the end state acts as a motivator to keep turning up everyday to do what it takes to get to the goal.

But, it doesn't help set up a rhythm, a routine for getting to that end state and realizing that outcome. It doesn't help set the pace for how we ought to make progress.

And that is where systems come in.

Each of my outcome-oriented goals are of a longer timeframe - at least a year long. However, my micro goals are all systems-oriented and are of a much shorter timeframe - from a day to a week. The systems-oriented micro goals, the counterparts of the above stated outcome-oriented goals, look something like this:

Write 500 words a day.Stick to the weekly workout and diet plan.Publish one short blog post a day.Publish one long blog post a week.Pay off 3x the EMI amount each month.
This makes it very actionable and easy to plan my day / week.

If all I have are my outcome-oriented goals, then I don't have a clue what I should be doing this week to publish a novel. Sitting in mid March, if my goal is to publish a novel by the end of the year, I will have a tendency to relax and procrastinate. I did this a lot in college with my projects where I would not start working on them until the deadline was looming close, and then end up sacrificing on the quality to meet the deadline. Not to mention the added pressure I put myself through to meet the deadlines.

However, with systems-oriented micro goals to accompany the outcome-oriented goals, I have a clear picture of what I need to be doing this week in mid March to hit my goal by the end of the year.

And at regular intervals, I can modify the systems to focus more or less on any of the individual goals. If I keep up the 500 words a day and find myself ahead of schedule in June, I can reduce it to 300 a day and focus on other goals that I'm behind on.

The outcomes and the systems are complementary and I need them both to achieve the goals I set myself.

One of the consequences of setting goals is that we fall behind on them. The theory goes, if we aren't falling behind on some of our goals, we have set very easy goals for ourselves.

And when we fall behind on some goals, it can quickly erode our motivation to follow through on trying to achieve those goals. And this is leads to a downward spiral of ensuring we fall further behind on those goals and get further demotivated, until we give up on it altogether.

Whenever I catch myself going into such a spiral, I ask myself, 'Why did I set these goals in the first place?'

Sometimes, I would have failed to anticipate the work that needs to be done in order to achieve a goal while setting it. Since I set outcome driven goals, like publish a book, hit a certain weight, etc, how I get there doesn't feature at the time of setting the goals. Once I set myself a process for getting to the desired outcome and start acting on it, I realize that the effort needed is a lot higher than what I had been willing to put in. In such cases, I will reassess the outcome and aim for a more practical milestone so that I continue to be motivated and put in the amount of effort I can rather than give up altogether.

Other times, I would have set up goals simply due to peer pressure or other extrinsic motivations. And I end up hating the process of getting there, which leaves me in a place of doing something because I want to achieve something that I don't particularly care about but have decided to do as others expect me to be doing something like this. This is actually a very hard realization to arrive at as our minds tend to believe that we really want something that was originally driven by extrinsic motivations. Only when we go several levels deeper asking why we care about achieving this do we realize that our motivations are extrinsic and aren't really aligned with our values. Such times, I give up and put the goal aside.

But more often, I end up being reminded of the long term value of pursuing this goal and why I originally decided to go after this, which rekindles my motivation and I kill the downward spiral at the bud.

So, while setting goals, be clear on why you want to go after them. As that will play a big role in deciding whether you see it through or not.

It was the epitome of user experience to be able to leave a message when the other person failed to pick up our call, to be able to drive fifty kilometres without charging the electric car again, to have a web page load in under a minute, to have a camera embedded in our phone (however lousy), to be able to read a message on our smartphone notification without opening the app.

And yet, today, they are all hygiene or less.

When we didn't have those experiences, we would either wish for it or be amazed when we came across a product that enabled it. With time, however, other products catch on and what used to amaze us turns into something commonplace that every product offers. And we begin to crave for the next level of improvements.

This is the simple reason why the product economy will always exist. We will always aspire for something more in the things we use and the experiences we have. We will always notice a room for improvement.

The same is true in what we want for ourselves. I was recently talking to a friend about The 0.7 Club and was telling her how I'm trying to have the most productive year ever, and she asked me why I see a need to go after more and why I'm not satisfied with what I'm already doing.

I have heard this line of argument several times, especially when it comes to money. The whole concept of minimalism is built around this idea of being content with less and not aspiring for more.

However, what most people fail to see is that that isn't transferable to all spheres of life. Even the minimalism movement only talks about being content with less material things and money instead of continually aspiring for more. And that is an idea I thoroughly subscribe to.

And yet, I seem to contradict myself when I tell people I'm working to make this my most productive year so far.

Of course, I see through it and realise there is no contradiction at all. When it comes to my skills, my knowledge and personal growth, I am like most customers with constantly rising expectations. The moment I hit a certain level, I'm itching to go on to the next.

Not having this view of always moving goal posts isn't healthy as a life with nothing to aspire to isn't a live worth living. We always aspire for more of something. But it is up to us to decide what that something should be. Whether it should be money and material things or skills and knowledge and personal growth.